The collected works of Trippynet - Page 2

Henrik: Also check out Ian Mapleson's site: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk

Loads of bits for sale there, and both my current main SGI systems came from him.

That's pretty neat! I was always amazed that SGI took the dumb decision to put incandescent bulbs there originally.

Blue LEDs had been around since the mid 90s and would have looked fine!

Bear in mind that SGI machines were supposed to be high-end and I can't imagine that the cost of a blue LED was that big a deal. In the mid 90s I bought some for hobbyist use and sure they were 5 times the price of a red LED, but that still only made them £1.50 each. They looked bright and cool, and SGI machines were all about looking funky and at the cutting edge.

My problem is that incandescent bulbs only have a limited lifetime of a few years and can't be changed on the Octane without a soldering iron. I think SGI should have come up with a better/more robust solution than a little bulb that would pop after a few years.

Whilst I understand your point, and also the fact that downloading an ISO of software you own a license for is not in itself necessarily illegal, I would point you to the red warning message at the top. Mr Neko wishes (understandably) to keep this forum clean of any dodgy activity...

Never said the Indigo2 was loud, that's the Tezro. Well, the I2 a fair bit noisier than a modern PC (obviously), but it's not difficult to replace the fans. I did that with mine and my Indigo2 now only makes a quiet humming noise as a result. My Fuel (stock fans) is much louder.

Any reason why you swapped the M-Audio for the Audigy? It otherwise looks like a very nice upgrade indeed, but that part seems to be a step backwards!

Bargain of the century!

Ian Mapleson sells an Octane similar to that (only 2GB of RAM). Price is £1,850.

Either way, you've picked up a scorcher there for £30!

There's something so fulfilling about using an old piece of hardware that many would have dumped for a genuinely useful purpose still. Nice one, and thanks for sharing!

ClassicHasClass wrote: I'd like to do a Firefox 4 port on Irix, but right now I'm knee deep in getting Mozilla's irregexp native compiler to tolerate big-endianness. I think I finally have it working, but there are other problems.

Yeah, I seem to remember the last attempt to port Firefox 10 back in 2013 ran out of steam due to the sheer scale of the work required

I'd say there was also such an in-built mentality for not seeing the writing on the walls and planning properly. OK they'd planned to move for Itanium for years (and were WAY too vocal about it - hence putting IRIX/MIPS into the same boat as Nokia's Symbian handsets a few years back), but they never really seemed to think about the software side until it was too late.

In comparison, for many years Apple had an internal port of Mac OS X running on x86 hardware "just in case". They knew that PowerPC had its weaknesses and wanted to be prepared. Hence when the time came (ie, PowerPC was too hot for mobile and Intel was finally in the process of dropping the awful Pentium 4), the transition was fairly straight forward and painless because a lot of the work had already been done.

Of course, these companies were in different markets, however one of the main unique things that sets a Mac apart from any other x86 box out there is Mac OS X. Bung Linux on instead and it's not the same.

For SGI, by the time they really started thinking properly about Itanium, they'd done no work in porting, it looked like a huge and expensive job to do, and Linux just looked cheaper and easier. Of course, the downside is why buy an Itanium desktop unit with an Nvidia graphics card and Linux on it from SGI, when you can buy one for a lot less from plenty of other companies? With no IRIX, no internal graphics division and customer CPUs from Intel, there was nothing unique left.

SGI focused for a while on high-end systems as has been written above, but they really threw away too many markets without a fight.

Really looking forward to trying this out on my Indigo2 when I get chance

Best of luck

Tom's Hardware have recently run a 3 part series called "Who makes the most elite PC case" - Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 .

There's a few interesting (and expensive) cases in there, so it's worth a look through for a nice looking and quality chassis.

An overheating Fuel perhaps?

Welcome! XMMS is decent for music, and of course takes classic Winamp skins as well. I've ran it with no problems on several SGI machines. Couple it with a 300GB disk full of music and an O2 makes a very nice little jukebox, especially if you replace the PSU fan with a quieter one

Web browsing wise, Dillo 3 is incredibly fast, but also very basic (although better than Netscape). For simple sites, it's great, and it works well with Nekoware and Nekochan! I've actually found on my old Indigo2 that SeaMonkey is faster than Firefox and does a good job of rendering a lot of reasonably modern/complex pages (although it'll choke with very new stuff). Always bear in mind that browsing the web isn't exactly what SGIs were designed for, and that applies doubly for O2s...

commodorejohn wrote: Unfortunately true. Windows Explorer was never anything amazing, but it used to be a fairly solid, dependable file manager/graphical shell for those of us who didn't need anything fancy. Unfortunately, Microsoft has been trying to progressively dumb it down and turn it into a glorified media-library browser for years now, and ever since Vista they've taken away more and more of the options for getting it back to its sensible old self. Worst of all, they've started changing shit that breaks existing workflows; that's been the last straw that got me to suck it up and have another go at acclimating to Linux after three years of leaving it the hell alone.

They've also been very good at introducing annoying bugs then refusing to fix them too. In Windows 7 there's the annoying "folder jumping" bug whereby every time you open a sub folder in the tree view, it scrolls upwards to hide all the contents, so you have to manually scroll down, then open the next folder, it jumps upwards again, etc. When pressed MS said "yeah that's by design", which has to be one of the stupidest excuses not to fix a bug that I've ever seen.

Thankfully Classic Shell fixes it and restores other functionality that MS removed in their infinite wisdom...

Kumba wrote: I've been using ClassicShell for the last five years. Works great on everything from Vista (NT 6.0) to Windows 8.1 (NT 6.3), including the server releases. Still baffled by the "flat" look in Win8/Win2012R2. The border is too thick, but there's a registry setting that can fix that. I am curious to see what MS does to Win10's start menu, now that they've come to their senses (somewhat) and added it back. Though, I suspect I'll find something annoying about it and just install an updated ClassicShell to cover it up.

I've used it since Windows 7 came along (didn't use Vista, outside of an initial bit of trialling before jumping back to XP). I keep the standard Windows 7 start menu, but do use classic shell to fix the folder jumping, add back the "shared" icon overlay to folders, restore the "disk space free" entry to the status bar, etc. It's nice and also very flexible, and the amount of options it has also shows you just how much useful stuff MS removed for some stupid reason or other.

Doubt it'd work on a machine with no admin rights though unfortunately, although if you try hard enough, there's almost always a way around that .

I can emphasise. I went through a period of nearly 7 years without booting up an SGI machine (busy with changing jobs, moving house several times, family etc), then caught the bug again 18 months ago

And then this comes along.

A long-term endurance test has shown that after writing 2 petabytes to SSDs, two out of 6 were still running.

Just a quick one, but have you tried upgrading? The maintenance overlays for IRIX 6.5.22 are available for free from SGI's site (once you've signed up for an account). It's only 6.5.23 onwards that require an active SGI maintenance contract.

foetz wrote: yay it's back. was worried already

Me too. For a day or so it's just a case of "Aww shucks, I'm sure it'll be fixed soon". Once you're up to 3-4+ days though it's easy to become concerned. After all, if the forum, wiki and repositories were to disappear for good, it would be a crippling blow for our classic SGIs!

Nekonoko: Thank you for fixing and continuing to provide this great service

Woo, back again. Great to see the site back online!

I wonder if it's possible to get the prosilver theme from the older phpBB added back as an option? I find the subsilver2 theme to be very basic indeed, whereas the older prosilver theme still rendered fine on Dillo, SeaMonkey etc and looked nicer whilst still being broadly compatible with older browsers.

The new prosilver theme seems to be a step backwards IMHO from a usability point of view. Fixed width (which looks worse on my nice monitor now that Nekochan is squeezed into a narrow column down the middle), and no direct access to the "Active Topics" link without running through a pop-up Javascript menu. Getting the older prosilver theme back though would be a great middle-ground.

Just to note, not a complaint in any way, just a request! As always, thank you for the work you do with hosting these forums.

Decided to give this a try on my Indigo2. It installs fine and from a performance point of view, it's still nippy enough for me and makes browsing Nekochan much more of a pleasant experience than Firefox or SeaMonkey.

Only problem I've noticed with it so far is that the menus appear to be a bit screwed up. Any idea what could be causing this?

Incidentally, the "Active Topics" link is still there in the ProSilver theme, it's just that the plonkers at phpBB thought it'd be great to hide it behind the "Quick Links" menu, so now you've got twice as much clicking to do in order to use one of the most commonly used links on the site.

....Which is why I also switched back to Subsilver. That and the annoying fixed-width thing that phpBB also implemented.

Note: Not a dig at you nekonoko, please don't read it as such. I have the utmost respect for the work you do with hosting nekochan. It's aimed squarely at the phpBB devs who like to cock things up which worked fine before.

Awesome! I'll try that when I get time, but might not be for a week or two as my computer room is in the process of becoming a guest room for a few days

Well, if you will enable cookies...

You could check with Ian Mapleson to see if he has any? Website is http://www.sgidepot.co.uk

There's a rather pricey one listed on his site, but it's worth contacting him as the site isn't always up to date and he might have something cheaper as well.

josehill wrote: Yeah, his site is pretty legendary.

That is seriously impressive stuff! Right down to being able to change the background and everything.

Nice! Looks like a tower version of an Osborne. Must have been one of the final CRT ones overall. I have a Toshiba T1000 kicking around somewhere from 1987. That's an 8088, but does have an LCD screen and a more conventional clamshell design.

Ian has them listed on his site as in-stock, but at £225 for two 1GB modules, they aren't cheap!

Seeing as the XMMS site is largely dead these days and none of the plugin links work any more, I wondered if anyone else here had any XMMS plugins that they'd managed to obtain and get working under IRIX? I'd be particularly interested in trying out the Crossfade plugin if it's possible to compile it under IRIX (even source code would be a start). I have downloaded the couple of visualiser plugins that are already in Nekoware incidentally (thanks to those that provided them).

Thanks in advance!

Welcome and hello! Look forward to seeing the hinv posted in due course, and pictures too

You wasted no time! "Hello everyone. Oh, and eat my 900MHz Fuel".

Nice system by the way, but Classic is right that another GB or so of RAM and a V12 would be the cherry on the top

ClassicHasClass wrote: But ... but ... isn't everyone here using their SGIs for Serious Businesseses?

Does "idle pratting around and general experimenting" count?

The Fuel is still a very nice system and does have some advantages over the Tezro (mainly noise, space and power-usage). If you don't need multi-processing capability and can live with the fact that the case isn't as funky, it can be just as good if equipped with a few extras like a soundcard, gigabit ethernet card, etc.

Although saying that, from the two SGIs in my signature, I'd say my Indigo2 does get more use than my Fuel funnily enough.

vishnu wrote: I've still got my 30 year old copy of Forrest Mims' book "Getting Started in Electronics"...

Yeah, I know, I'm one of those old dudes...

Crikey, I've got one of those kicking around as well somewhere. Good fun to read when I was a lot smaller than I am now!

Yes please! Always looking to add a bit more functionality to my IRIX apps.

For the other plugins, I've managed to get the source of several of them via old XMMS pages on WaybackMachine. Managed to compile CrossFade successfully over the weekend, but the processing requirements seem a bit beyond my Indigo2 and I haven't had chance to try it yet on the Fuel. This weekend I aim to have a go at compiling the Pitch plugin to see how/if that works.

ivelegacy wrote: 200 euro is very expensive for a CPU module, as 150 euro is very expensive for a XIO24_PCI_cartridge, but i needed them as i am a gentoo/mips developer and more specifically i was working about the linux kernel (2.6.17.rc4+hacks) in order to add a PCI_USB_card on the IP30 machine

Problem is that these are some of the fastest CPU options ever released for Octane, and as such there is still reasonable demand for them from people who want to upgrade existing systems rather than replacing them outright - hence the high prices. Same goes with most of the accessories for SGI systems unfortunately. Hence why MaxIMPACT for Indigo2 sells for a lot more than MXI for the Octane, despite both being almost identical technology underneath.

The faster dual-CPU options for Octane are particularly sought after as the only other multi-processor options are Onyx/Origin (which are large and noisy), or Tezro (expensive as there was no faster MIPS machine released by SGI). Had SGI continued to produce MIPS kit after the Tezro, things might be different of course.